US President Barack Obama’s administration on Friday released a legislative proposal intended to provide foreign governments with a streamlined process for asking US tech companies to share e-mail data and conduct wiretaps for criminal investigations.
The framework comes one day after a US federal appeals court said the government could not compel Microsoft to turn over customer e-mails stored on servers outside the US.
The proposal would require the US Congress to change decades-old electronic communications law. It would also require the consent of any foreign government because it is designed to be reciprocal.
Britain is the first country the US is seeking to enter into such a bilateral agreement with.
A technology industry group said it was encouraged by the talks between the US and Britain.
“A strengthened legal framework must value privacy and human rights while ensuring law enforcement can do its important work,” tech industry advocacy group Reform Government Surveillance said in a statement.
Current agreements used to allow law enforcement access to data stored overseas are known as mutual legal assistance treaties.
However, such treaties — which involve making a formal diplomatic request for data and having authorities in the host country obtain a warrant on behalf of the requesting nation — are considered overly cumbersome by law enforcement officials who say the process often takes several months.
“The current situation is unsustainable,” US Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik wrote to US Vice President Joe Biden in a letter proposing the new framework. “If foreign governments cannot access data they need for legitimate law enforcement, including terrorism investigations, they may also enact laws requiring companies to store data in their territory.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.